The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Who is the oldest? Is this the end of it? Is this the beginning? Wake up! Wake up!” he called when he was sure he was in the lowest and oldest room.

  “Is it Ritual?” asked some who woke up. Smaller than mice they were, no bigger than bees, maybe older than both.

  “It is a special Ritual,” Ceran told them. “Relate to me how it was in the beginning.”

  What was that sound—too slight, too scattered to be a noise? It was like a billion microbes laughing. It was the hilarity of little things waking up to a high time.

  “Who is the oldest of all?” Ceran demanded, for their laughter bothered him. “Who is the oldest and first?”

  “I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother,” one said gaily. “All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?”

  “Of course,” said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them.

  “Then you must be the ultimate child, for you are like no other. If you be, then it is as funny at the end as it was in the beginning.”

  “How was it in the beginning?” Ceran bleated. “You are the first. Do you know how you came to be?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” laughed the ultimate grandmother, and the hilarity of the small things became a real noise now.

  “How did it begin?” demanded Ceran, and he was hopping and skipping about in his excitement.

  “Oh, it was so funny a joke the way things began that you would not believe it,” chittered the grandmother. “A joke, a joke!”

  “Tell me the joke, then. If a joke generated your species, then tell me that cosmic joke.”

  “Tell yourself,” tinkled the grandmother. “You are a part of the joke if you are of my children. Oh, it is too funny to believe. How good to wake up and laugh and go to sleep again.”

  Blazing green frustration! To be so close and to be balked by a giggling bee!

  “Don’t go to sleep again! Tell me at once how it began!” Ceran shrilled, and he had the ultimate grandmother between thumb and finger.

  “This is not Ritual,” the grandmother protested. “Ritual is that you guess what it was for three days, and we laugh and say, ‘No, no, no, it was something nine times as wild as that. Guess some more.’ ”

  “I will not guess for three days! Tell me at once or I will crush you,” Ceran threatened in a quivering voice.

  “I look at you, you look at me, I wonder if you will do it,” the ultimate grandmother said calmly.

  Any of the tough men of the Expedition would have done it—would have crushed her, and then another and another and another of the creatures till the secret was told. If Ceran had taken on a tough personality and a tough name he’d have done it. If he’d been Gutboy Barrelhouse he’d have done it without a qualm. But Ceran Swicegood couldn’t do it.

  “Tell me,” he pleaded in agony. “All my life I’ve tried to find out how it began, how anything began. And you know!”

  “We know. Oh, it was so funny how it began. So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing! Nobody could guess, nobody could believe.”

  “Tell me! Tell me!” Ceran was ashen and hysterical.

  “No, no, you are no child of mine,” chortled the ultimate grandmother. “Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?”

  “Tell me! Insult me! Let me die laughing!” But Ceran nearly died crying from the frustration that ate him up as a million bee-sized things laughed and hooted and giggled:

  “Oh, it was so funny the way it began!”

  And they laughed. And laughed. And went on laughing…until Ceran Swicegood wept and laughed together, and crept away, and returned to the ship still laughing. On his next voyage he changed his name to Blaze Bolt and ruled for ninety-seven days as king of a sweet sea island in M-81, but that is another and much more unpleasant story.

  Day Million

  FREDERIK POHL

  Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) was an iconic and highly adaptive US science fiction writer whose career started in the Golden Age and spanned three-quarters of a century. That Pohl remained a relevant and vital part of the science fiction scene for so many decades is a testament to his talent, his multitude of interests, a general inquisitiveness, and the ways in which he mentored others.

  Among the many honors Pohl received, he won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his most-famous novel, Gateway (1977). Pohl also won a US National Book Award for his novel Jem (1979) in the one-year-only science fiction category (enough was enough) and was a finalist for three other years’ best-novel awards. Pohl received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award (1993) and entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998.

  In addition to his fiction, Pohl served as the editor of two magazines for almost a decade: Galaxy and its sister magazine IF (1959–69). Before that, he had edited Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories (just prior to World War II). He also edited several anthologies. As an early member of the Futurians—which included the similarly intellectually curious James Blish—Pohl believed in a cosmopolitan approach to science fiction and was a champion of international fiction in translation, especially from Japan. At various times he also wrote nonfiction prolifically and served as a literary agent. He collaborated in fiction with fellow writer C. M. Kornbluth and on anthology projects with his third wife, Carol Metcalf Ulf Stanton. He was also influenced by his second wife, the writer and editor Judith Merril. In all ways he was what was once called “a man of letters” and seemed unable to sit still and not busy himself with projects.

  Pohl’s fiction began in the 1950s with slickly ironic satire with hints of absurdism and dark humor. During the 1950s he also cowrote, with Kornbluth, the satirical gem The Space Merchants; the novel featured a dystopian future dominated by overpopulation and ecological devastation. Throughout the 1960s, Pohl continued to explore and grow as a writer, culminating with his famous 1970s and 1980s Heechee series about encounters with the artifacts left behind by aliens who have gone into hiding. The first book, Gateway (1977), and its equally excellent sequel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) forever cemented Pohl’s already considerable reputation in the field.

  Oddly, given his wide range of interests and devotion to high standards of quality, Pohl was a public critic of the New Wave. He found its excesses mystifying and self-indulgent, without, apparently, being able to identify its legitimate antecedents in mainstream literary fiction, surrealism, Decadent literature, and experimental writing that powered the movement. Regardless, “Day Million” (Rogue, 1966) fits comfortably within a proto–New Wave tradition by dint of its Borgesian compression of narrative and an unconventional approach to societal norms. However, the story is also included in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), for the exceedingly rigorous reason that “the attitude is right, giving it the texture and feel of hard sf. It is written for the reader who understands the hopelessness of a [far future] universe without physical constants.” So perhaps part of the enduring appeal of “Day Million” is that it straddles many different modes and approaches to science fiction.

  DAY MILLION

  Frederik Pohl

  On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl, and a love story.

  Now although I haven’t said much so far, none of it is true. The boy was not what you and I would normally think of as a boy, because he was a hundred and eighty-seven years old. Nor was the girl a girl, for other reasons; and the love story did not entail that sublimation of the urge to rape and concurrent postponement of the instinct to submit which we at present understand in such matters. You won’t care much for this story if you don’t grasp these facts at once. If, however, you will make the effort, you’ll likely enough find it jam-packed, chock-full, and tiptop-cra
mmed with laughter, tears, and poignant sentiment which may, or may not, be worthwhile. The reason the girl was not a girl was that she was a boy.

  How angrily you recoil from the page! You say, who the hell wants to read about a pair of queers? Calm yourself. Here are no hot-breathing secrets of perversion for the coterie trade. In fact, if you were to see this girl, you would not guess that she was in any sense a boy. Breasts, two; vagina, one. Hips, callipygian; face, hairless; supraorbital lobes, nonexistent. You would term her female at once, although it is true that you might wonder just what species she was a female of, being confused by the tail, the silky pelt, or the gill slits behind each ear.

  Now you recoil again. Cripes, man, take my word for it. This is a sweet kid, and if you, as a normal male, spent as much as an hour in a room with her, you would bend heaven and earth to get her in the sack. Dora (we will call her that; her “name” was omicron-Dibase seven-group-totter-oot S. Doradus 5314, the last part of which is a color specification corresponding to a shade of green)—Dora, I say, was feminine, charming, and cute. I admit she doesn’t sound that way. She was, as you might put it, a dancer. Her art involved qualities of intellection and expertise of a very high order, requiring both tremendous natural capacities and endless practice; it was performed in null-gravity and I can best describe it by saying that it was something like the performance of a contortionist and something like classical ballet, maybe resembling Danilova’s dying swan. It was also pretty damned sexy. In a symbolic way, to be sure; but face it, most of the things we call “sexy” are symbolic, you know, except perhaps an exhibitionist’s open fly. On Day Million when Dora danced, the people who saw her panted; and you would too.

  About this business of her being a boy. It didn’t matter to her audiences that genetically she was male. It wouldn’t matter to you, if you were among them, because you wouldn’t know it—not unless you took a biopsy cutting of her flesh and put it under an electron microscope to find the XY chromosome—and it didn’t matter to them because they didn’t care. Through techniques which are not only complex but haven’t yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn’t we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.

  How much is “very little”? Oh, about as much as would be caused by our own tampering with Divine Will by filling a tooth. Less than would be caused by wearing a hearing aid. Does it still sound awful? Then look closely at the next busty babe you meet and reflect that she may be a Dora, for adults who are genetically male but somatically female are far from unknown even in our own time. An accident of environment in the womb overwhelms the blueprints of heredity. The difference is that with us it happens only by accident and we don’t know about it except rarely, after close study; whereas the people of Day Million did it often, on purpose, because they wanted to.

  Well, that’s enough to tell you about Dora. It would only confuse you to add that she was seven feet tall and smelled of peanut butter. Let us begin our story.

  On Day Million Dora swam out of her house, entered a transportation tube, was sucked briskly to the surface in its flow of water and ejected in its plume of spray to an elastic platform in front of her—ah—call it her rehearsal hall. “Oh, shit!” she cried in pretty confusion, reaching out to catch her balance and finding herself tumbled against a total stranger, whom we will call Don.

  They met cute. Don was on his way to have his legs renewed. Love was the farthest thing from his mind; but when, absentmindedly taking a shortcut across the landing platform for submarinites and finding himself drenched, he discovered his arms full of the loveliest girl he had ever seen, he knew at once they were meant for each other. “Will you marry me?” he asked. She said softly, “Wednesday,” and the promise was like a caress.

  —

  Don was tall, muscular, bronze, and exciting. His name was no more Don than Dora’s was Dora, but the personal part of it was Adonis in tribute to his vibrant maleness, and so we will call him Don for short. His personality color-code, in Angstrom units, was 5290, or only a few degrees bluer than Dora’s 5314, a measure of what they had intuitively discovered at first sight, that they possessed many affinities of taste and interest.

  I despair of telling you exactly what it was that Don did for a living—I don’t mean for the sake of making money, I mean for the sake of giving purpose and meaning to his life, to keep him from going off his nut with boredom—except to say that it involved a lot of traveling. He traveled in interstellar spaceships. In order to make a spaceship go really fast about thirty-one male and seven genetically female human beings had to do certain things, and Don was one of the thirty-one. Actually he contemplated options. This involved a lot of exposure to radiation flux—not so much from his own station in the propulsive system as in the spillover from the next stage, where a genetic female preferred selections and the subnuclear particles making the selections she preferred demolished themselves in a shower of quanta. Well, you don’t give a rat’s ass for that, but it meant that Don had to be clad at all times in a skin of light, resilient, extremely strong copper-colored metal. I have already mentioned this, but you probably thought I meant he was sunburned.

  More than that, he was a cybernetic man. Most of his ruder parts had been long since replaced with mechanisms of vastly more permanence and use. A cadmium centrifuge, not a heart, pumped his blood. His lungs moved only when he wanted to speak out loud, for a cascade of osmotic filters rebreathed oxygen out of his own wastes. In a way, he probably would have looked peculiar to a man from the twentieth century, with his glowing eyes and seven-fingered hands; but to himself, and of course to Dora, he looked mighty manly and grand. In the course of his voyages Don had circled Proxima Centauri, Procyon, and the puzzling worlds of Mira Ceti; he had carried agricultural templates to the planets of Canopus and brought back warm, witty pets from the pale companion of Aldebaran. Blue-hot or red-cool, he had seen a thousand stars and their ten thousand planets. He had, in fact, been traveling the starlanes with only brief leaves on Earth for pushing two centuries. But you don’t care about that, either. It is people that make stories, not the circumstances they find themselves in, and you want to hear about these two people. Well, they made it. The great thing they had for each other grew and flowered and burst into fruition on Wednesday, just as Dora had promised. They met at the encoding room, with a couple of well-wishing friends apiece to cheer them on, and while their identities were being taped and stored they smiled and whispered to each other and bore the jokes of their friends with blushing repartee. Then they exchanged their mathematical analogues and went away, Dora to her dwelling beneath the surface of the sea and Don to his ship.

  It was an idyll, really. They lived happily ever after—or anyway, until they decided not to bother anymore and died.

  Of course, they never set eyes on each other again.

  —

  Oh, I can see you now, you eaters of charcoal-broiled steak, scratching an incipient bunion with one hand and holding this story with the other, while the stereo plays d’Indy or Monk. You don’t believe a word of it, do you? Not for one minute. People wouldn’t live like that, you say with an irritated and not amused grunt as you get up to put fresh ice in a stale drink.

  And yet there’s Dora, hurrying back through the flushing commute pipes toward her underwater home (she prefers it there, has had herself somatically altered to breathe the stuff). If I tell you with what sweet fulfillment she fits the recorded analogue of Don into the symbol manipulator, hooks herself in, and turns herself on…if I try to
tell you any of that you will simply stare. Or glare; and grumble, what the hell kind of lovemaking is this? And yet I assure you, friend, I really do assure you that Dora’s ecstasies are as creamy and passionate as any of James Bond’s lady spies, and one hell of a lot more so than anything you are going to find in “real life.” Go ahead and grumble. Dora doesn’t care. If she thinks of you at all, her thirty times great-great-grandfather, she thinks you’re a pretty primordial sort of brute. You are. Why, Dora is farther removed from you than you are from the australopithecines of five thousand centuries ago. You could not swim a second in the strong currents of her life. You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-eater in your Relaxacizor chair, you’ve just barely lighted the Primacord of the fuse. What is it now, the six or seven hundred thousandth day after Christ? Dora lives in Day Million. A thousand years from now. Her body fats are polyunsaturated, like Crisco. Her wastes are hemodialyzed out of her bloodstream while she sleeps—that means she doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. On whim, to pass a slow half-hour, she can command more energy than the entire nation of Portugal can spend today, and use it to launch a weekend satellite or remold a crater on the moon. She loves Don very much. She keeps his every gesture, mannerism, nuance, touch of hand, thrill of intercourse, passion of kiss stored in symbolic-mathematical form. And when she wants him, all she has to do is turn the machine on and she has him.

  And Don, of course, has Dora. Adrift on a sponson city a few hundred yards over her head or orbiting Arcturus, fifty light-years away, Don has only to command his own symbol-manipulator to rescue Dora from the ferrite files and bring her to life for him, and there she is; and rapturously, tirelessly they ball all night. Not in the flesh, of course; but then his flesh has been extensively altered and it wouldn’t really be much fun. He doesn’t need the flesh for pleasure. Genital organs feel nothing. Neither do hands, nor breasts, nor lips; they are only receptors, accepting and transmitting impulses. It is the brain that feels, it is the interpretation of those impulses that makes agony or orgasm; and Don’s symbol-manipulator gives him the analogue of cuddling, the analogue of kissing, the analogue of wildest, most ardent hours with the eternal, exquisite, and incorruptible analogue of Dora. Or Diane. Or sweet Rose, or laughing Alicia; for to be sure, they have each of them exchanged analogues before, and will again.